By Janice Lindsay
Contributing Writer
When my sister and I were teenagers, she was walking home one day when a gray squirrel approached her, scampered up her clothes, and perched on her shoulder. Clearly, this was not your typical wild squirrel. And not a stupid one, either. My sister was an animal magnet, an incurable collector of four-legged creatures.
He rode on her shoulder all the way home, where we put him a cage and tried to figure out what to do about him. Squirrels do not make good pets. They gnaw, which isn’t healthy for household items like door frames and chair legs. I don’t remember if we tried to find his previous human companion, assuming he had one. If we did, nobody stepped forward.
We placed the cage near an open window that opened onto a roof with convenient tree access and left the cage door ajar. We put food in the cage. Eventually the squirrel ventured out but came back to eat. His favorite was brownie pudding, further evidence of his intelligence, in my opinion. Over time, he came back less and less and finally didn’t come back at all.
I think of him now because at this time of the year, many of our bird friends have left us for southern climates. Some of our human friends have, too. And our other mammalian neighbors like chipmunks and skunks, while not exactly hibernators, are preparing to spend much of the winter underground.
Squirrels stay here, above ground like us, some of our most faithful year-round neighbors.
Faithful, but perhaps a little odd, and not given to logical thought.
For example, at the house where we used to live, oak trees grew on our side of the road. The squirrels seemed determined to hide our acorns on the other side of the road. Oak trees grew over there, too, but those acorns must be hidden on our side. The result was much scurrying back and forth across the road.
One day I watched a squirrel that apparently craved the stimulating presence of extreme danger.
Acorn in mouth, it crouched alertly on the sidewalk’s edge. It looked both ways. No cars were coming. It flicked its tail. Still no cars. Then a car came into view. Just at the last second as the car approached, Squirrel darted into the road and raced toward the opposite sidewalk. The car came to a hasty stop. Another few inches and Squirrel would have been the day’s luncheon special at Crow Cafeteria. I’ve seen this behavior several times.
Many people have squirrel stories.
Like the bird-lover faced with “Emily,” the dive-bombing squirrel, who could land on a bird feeder from a tree branch ten feet above it and ten feet over. She gobbled every seed while the birds looked on in helpless dismay. It was hard for this educated human person to admit being outwitted by a squirrel. Fortunately, squirrels have a shorter life span than we do. The best this human could do was to outlive Emily.
Then there was the householder frustrated at hearing a squirrel’s hurry-scurry inside the kitchen walls of his old house. He stood in the kitchen with his shotgun and blasted the walls. There was no evidence that he harmed the squirrel. The same could not be said about the wall.
Like any neighbors, squirrels can be both annoying and entertaining. Even as I write this sentence, a gray furry neighbor tries to figure out how to scale the pole to my bird feeders. The squirrel baffle confuses it. For now.
Contact [email protected].
RELATED CONTENT:
